Secondarily, what do you when the enemy is using that expectation as piece of leverage to make it practically impossible to strike more surgically.
I’m not the smartest, but I seems like you’re saying that if one side uses their population as attack deterrents and shields that it’s incumbent on the other side to comply?
It is public info that Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member.
That is a ridiculously high figure in my opinion. I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect to witness something on such scale somewhere in the world during my lifetime, but I certainly didn't expect a modern-day "western" "democracy" to get away with it.
Before the war in Yemen? (>300k deaths and I think >20k civilians just from Saudi coalition air strikes)
Before the Russia-Ukraine war? (>25k civilians killed just in the siege of Mariupol according to Ukraine)
Before the US war with Afghanistan? (>46k civilians killed)
There are supposedly 30,000-40,000 Hamas combatants. The IDF said in December that it has killed 8000 Hamas combatants. In February it said 12,000 were killed. I don't know where you're getting your 1:20 ratio. Hamas certainly does not differentiate combatants from other casualties and at any rate you should have zero trust in their numbers. There were probably certain situations where a specific target was attacked with that or even higher ratios but the overall civilian to combatant casualty ratio, while unknown, is almost certainly nothing close to that.
What is your reference to "Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member"? I've never heard of that.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
It's been pretty widely reported; I've seen it repeated in every publication I follow.
(Don't forget that Israel triple-tapped an aid convoy because someone thought that a Hamas militant might have contacted them.)
What you said: "It is public info that Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member."
Let's look at the quote from your article: "In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants."
There are a few problems here:
- This is not sourced and we shouldn't treat it as fact. If other publications you read repeated that it doesn't change this. It's also not clear for how long this policy was in place if it was.
- This is a question of proportionality in the laws of war sense of the word. I.e. what collateral damage is acceptable when attacking an enemy combatant. If that statement you refer to is factual, which we don't know, it means that strikes against combatants are approved up this threshold.
- It's almost certainly not reflecting the total civilian to combatant ratio. It just says that in certain circumstances a combatant was targeted even if there are civilians present. That's something that happens in all wars. We don't have any information on the totality of strikes and which strikes met this exact threshold. I'm not sure what numbers other western armies use. The quote refers compares with previous situations which were not an outright war (and show that at least in the past Israel was a lot more careful about collateral damage).
Anyways, if you were more precise in your wording I wouldn't take issue, but I think the casual reader can read something different into what you've said. We can debate the morality of any particular collateral damage under conditions of dense urban environment, human shields, major war etc. but this is something that happens in all wars likely with somewhat different numbers.
> It's also not clear for how long this policy was in place if it was.
It's consistent with what has been observed all throughout this war--Israel has had rather looser rules of engagement than many people would expect, and that has had the rather predictable effect of rather high incidents of accidents, such as Israeli soldiers killing 3 of the hostages or the attack on the aid convoy.
> This is a question of proportionality in the laws of war sense of the word. I.e. what collateral damage is acceptable when attacking an enemy combatant. If that statement you refer to is factual, which we don't know, it means that strikes against combatants are approved up this threshold.
20 civilian combatants for 1 enemy combatant is a pretty high threshold, especially for low-level members. According to an Economist article I read, that's the level the US is comfortable with only for essentially enemy heads of state (think Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden). (Reportedly, Israel feels 1:100 is acceptable in this kind of scenario.)
> It's almost certainly not reflecting the total civilian to combatant ratio.
No, it's not. But it's evidence that Israel isn't doing a good job of minimizing civilian casualties. And the actual numbers we have here aren't good. In the best case scenario (taking Israel's probably somewhat-inflated figures for combatants killed and the lowest numbers of civilians killed), it's about 1 combatant to 2 civilians, roughly comparable to the war in Donbass before Russia invaded Ukraine for reals (we don't have good estimates post 2022 because Russia hasn't released anything in the areas it occupies). I suspect the real numbers are probably closer to 1-to-4. By contrast, the US-led battles of Fallujah and Mosul--both urban fights against terrorist-held cities--had casualty rates around (and perhaps better than) 1-to-1.
I wouldn't be so incensed about this if Israeli generals weren't prancing around boasting that no one has done as good a job as Israel has in minimizing civilian casualties when it is so transparently false.
When you look at civilian to combatant ratios you have to take into account the battlefield. You can't compare the war in Donbass to the war in Gaza. What's the population density in Donbass? Were combatants fighting in civilian clothes? Was there a human shield strategy at play? Tunnels? Booby traps?
I've heard experts give much higher civilian to casualty ratios than 1:2 for dense urban combat under these conditions. I've heard numbers like 1:8 (which I think is more or less the ratio for the war in Chechnya). I think the battle for Mariupol has fairly high rates if we want to use another comparison. There's this US Urban warfare expert (John Spencer) from West Point that goes around saying how Israel is doing a great job. So I'm not sure I agree with your transparently false observation. We need something more directly comparable. IIRC in the Battle of Mosul most civilians evacuated, also the number for dead civilians in that battle vary widely. Where I would tend to agree is that in the beginning of the war Israel pounded Gaza very heavily and likely at that phase with less care about collateral damage vs. damage to Hamas.
Incidents like friendly fire are fairly common in wars. I don't have any way of gauging how this one compares. Wikipedia says: "accounting for an estimated 2% to 20% of all casualties in battle".
Do you have comparable examples of armies warning civilians to evacuate, by dropping leaflets, sending text messages, and giving them time to do so like the IDF does (maybe not 100% of the time but certainly has done a lot during this war)? I think that's fairly unusual in comparable situations. I don't recall the US ever doing that in its wars.
Could Israel do a better job avoiding civilians. Likely yes. Is it possible to completely eliminate this under the circumstances (30,000 combatants, in civilian clothes, fighting from population centers) - I don't think so. I also agree the "boasting" about avoiding civilians is at the very least in poor taste. We should feel sorry for civilians killed regardless of the "ratio".
https://airwars.org/news/raqqa-a-city-destroyed-then-forgott...
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/92961/pdf/
No ICC arrest warrants. No encampments. Crickets. How many westerners did ISIS kill? 100? The US, UK, Australia and Russia (+ others?) blitzed the heck out of anything that moved in a place far away that presented no direct existential threat to any of them. Under significantly more favorable conditions on the battlefield than the IDF is facing in Gaza (how many casualties did western powers take in this blitz? zero?)
"In total, these claims allege more than 26,000 non combatant fatalities. Airwars presently assesses that at a minimum, between 6,300 and 9,700 civilians are likely to have died in Coalition actions overall – approximately 40 percent during the recent battles for Mosul and Raqqa"
"Much of the Old City of Mosul and almost 70% of Raqqa’s entirety have been rendered uninhabitable, according to the United Nations."
The explanations to be accepted by the court would have to be presented as evidence at trial, which would require their to be a court case.
Yes, if their explanations were accepted as conclusive by the prosecutor there wouldn't be a court case, but the prosecutor isn't the final decisionmaker for the court.
> The UN just made a huge change to their accounting blaming "the fog of war" which puts their numbers much more in line with what Israel was saying.
While the details of the charges asked for, beyond their titles, have not been laid out, I don't think the numerical counts that have been adjusted have much bearing on any of them.
They totally do. They halved the number of children and women killed which completely changes the combatant/civilian ratio.
> The explanations to be accepted by the court would have to be presented as evidence at trial, which would require their to be a court case.
It's hard to see what sort of evidence will be accepted by the court. Hamas claims every single person killed is a civilian (and their combatants fight in civilian clothes) while Israel claims it's targeting combatants. What sort of Israel do you think Israel can present that will clearly support its case and will be accepted? Is there some sort of uninvolved party that can give us the truth here?
There's quite a history of ICC cases (and they build on a history of ad hoc tribunals like those for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.)
The kinds of evidence that are acceptable are... not particularly mysterious.
> Hamas claims every single person killed is a civilian (and their combatants fight in civilian clothes) while Israel claims it's targeting combatants.
Yeah, if the ICC operated on the level of these kinds of claims it wouldn't take months of evidence gathering before referrals to get to warrants.
> What sort of Israel do you think Israel can present that will clearly support its case and will be accepted?
Once there are actual charges with specifics (right now, we just have the names of crimes for which warrants are being sought, not the specific charges) the kinds of evidence that would tend to disprove the specific charges against specific individuals will be more clear.